Variational Uncertainty Decomposition for In-Context Learning

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• Yingzhen Li (Imperial College London)
• Thursday 12 June 2025, 11:00-12:30
• Cambridge University Engineering Department, CBL Seminar room BE4-38..

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Xianda Sun.

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity in conducting prediction tasks in-context, understanding the sources of uncertainty in in-context learning becomes essential to ensuring reliability. The recent hypothesis of in-context learning performing predictive Bayesian inference opens the avenue for Bayesian uncertainty estimation, particularly for decomposing uncertainty into epistemic uncertainty due to lack of in-context data and aleatoric uncertainty inherent in the in-context prediction task. However, the decomposition idea remains under-explored due to the intractability of the latent parameter posterior from the underlying Bayesian model. In this work, we introduce a variational uncertainty decomposition framework for in-context learning without explicitly sampling from the latent parameter posterior, by optimising auxiliary inputs as probes to obtain an upper bound to the aleatoric uncertainty of an LLM ’s in-context learning procedure. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world tasks, we show quantitatively and qualitatively that the decomposed uncertainties obtained from our method exhibit desirable properties of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty.

This talk is part of the Machine Learning Reading Group @ CUED series.

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